“Must this be done now?”
Joy bowed. “Very sorry, master, but this is an emergency.” She turned and barked commands at me like a Roman centurion. “Move that table over there, can’t you see that it rests on the tiger’s testicles? Then point those chairs so they face the doorway, they lie on the dragon’s navel. We’re lucky someone hasn’t broken a leg.”
“Yeah, lucky,” I said, straining to move the huge carved table, wishing that Joy had recruited a couple of the other girls to help. I’d been studying feng shui for more than three years now and I still couldn’t detect the least bit of Chi, coming or going. Joshua had reconciled the elusive energy by saying that it was just an Oriental way to express God all around us and in all things. That may have helped him toward some sort of spiritual understanding, but it was about as effective as trained sheep when it came to arranging furniture.
“Can I help?” Joshua asked.
“No!” shouted Balthasar, standing up. “We will continue in my quarters.” The old wizard turned and glared at Joy and me. “And we are not to be disturbed, under any circumstances.”
He took Joshua by the shoulder and led him out of the room.
“So much for spying,” I said.
Joy consulted the Chi clock and patted a cabinet filled with calligraphy materials. “This most certainly rides on the horn of the ox, it must be moved,” she pronounced.
“They are gone,” I said. “We don’t have to pretend at this anymore.”
“Who is pretending? That cabinet channels all the yin into the hall, while the yang circles like a bird of prey.”
“Joy, stop it. I know you’re making this stuff up.”
She dropped the brass instrument to her side. “I am not.”
“Yes, you are.” And here I thought I’d push my credibility a bit, just to see. “I checked the yang in this room yesterday. It is in perfect balance.”
Joy dropped to her hands and knees, crawled under one of the huge carved dragon tables, curled up into a ball, and began to cry. “I’m no good at this. Balthasar wants us all to know it, but I’ve never understood it. If you want the Elegant Torture of a Thousand Pleasant Touches, I can do it, you want someone poisoned, castrated, or blown up, I’m your man, but this feng shui stuff is just, just…”
“Stupid?” I supplied.
“No, I was going to say difficult. Now I’ve angered Balthasar and we have no way of knowing what is happening between him and Joshua. And we must know.”
“I can find out,” I said, polishing my nails on my tunic. “But I have to know why I’m finding out.”
“How will you find out?”
“I have ways that are more subtle and crafty than all your Chinese alchemy and direction of energies.”
“Now who’s making things up?” I’d lost most of my credibility by dragging out the arcane-Hebrew-knowledge-for-sexual-favors ruse until I had actually claimed credit for receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments as well as constructing the Ark of the Covenant. (What? It’s not my fault. Joshua was the one who would never let me be Moses when we were kids.)
“If I find out, will you tell me what is going on?”
The head concubine chewed at an elegantly lacquered nail as she thought about it. “You promise not to tell anyone if I tell you? Not even your friend Joshua?”
“I promise.”
“Then do what you will. But remember your lessons from The Art of War.”
I considered the words of Sun-tzu, which Joy had taught me: Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby, you can be the director of the opponent’s fate. So after considering strategy carefully, running and rejecting the various scenarios in my head, working out what seemed a nearly foolproof plan, and making sure the timing was perfect, I went into action. That very night, as I lay in my bed and Joshua in his, I called forth all my powers of subtlety and mysteriousness.
“Hey Josh,” I said. “Balthasar sodomizing you?”
“No!”
“Vice versa?”
“Absolutely not!”
“You get the feeling he’d like to?”
He was quiet for a second, then he said, “He’s been very attentive lately. And he giggles at everything I say, why?”
“Because Joy says it’s not good if he falls in love with you.”
“Well, it’s not if he’s expecting any sodomizing, I’ll tell you that. That’s going to be one disappointed magus.”
“No, worse than that. She won’t tell me what, but it’s really, really bad.”
“Biff, I realize you may not think so, but from my way of thinking, sodomizing the Son of God is really, really bad.”
“Good point. But I think she means something to do with whatever is behind the iron door. Until I find out, you have to keep Balthasar from falling in love with you.”
“I’ll bet he was myrrh,” said Josh. “Bastard, he brings the cheapest gift and now he wants to sodomize me. My mother told me the myrrh went bad after a week too.”
Did I mention that Joshua was not a myrrh fan?
Chapter 14
Meanwhile, back at the hotel room, Raziel has given up his hopes to be a professional wrestler and has resumed his ambition to be Spider-Man. He made the decision after I pointed out that in Genesis, Jacob wrestles an angel and wins. In short, a human defeated an angel. Raziel kept insisting that he didn’t remember that happening and I was tempted to bring the Gideon Bible in out of the bathroom and show him the reference, but I’ve just started reading the Gospel of Mark and I’d lose the book if the angel found out about it.
I thought Matthew was bad, skipping right from Joshua’s birth to his baptism, but Mark doesn’t even bother with the birth. It’s as if Joshua springs forth full grown from the head of Zeus. (Okay, bad metaphor, but you know what I mean.) Mark begins with the baptism, at thirty! Where did these guys get these stories? “I once met a guy in a bar who knew a guy who’s sister’s best friend was at the baptism of Joshua bar Joseph of Nazareth, and here’s the story as best as he could remember it.”
Well, at least Mark mentions me, once. And then it’s totally out of context, as if I was just sitting around doing nothing and Joshua happened by and asked me to tag along. And Mark tells of the demon named Legion. Yeah, I remember Legion. Compared to what Balthasar called up, Legion was a wuss.
I asked Balthasar if he was smitten with me,” Joshua said over supper.
“Oh no,” said Joy. We were eating in the girls’ quarters. It smelled really good and the girls would rub our shoulders while we ate. Just what we needed after a tough day of studying.
“You weren’t supposed to let him know we were on to him. What did he say?”
“He said that he’d just come off of a hard breakup and he wasn’t ready for a relationship because he just needed to spend a little time getting to know himself, but that he’d love it if we could just be friends.”
“He lies,” said Joy. “He hasn’t had a breakup in a hundred years.”
I said, “Josh, you are so gullible. Guys always lie about stuff like that. That’s the problem with your not being allowed to know women, it means you don’t understand the most fundamental nature of men.”
“Which is?”
“We’re lying pigs. We’ll say anything to get what we want.”
“That’s true,” said Joy. The other girls nodded in agreement.
“But,” said Josh, “the superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue, according to Confucius.”
“Of course,” said I, “but the superior man can get laid without lying. I’m talking about the rest of us.”
“So should I be worried about this trip he wants me to take with him?”
Joy nodded gravely and the other girls nodded with her.
“I don’t see why,” I said. “What trip?”
“He says we’ll only be gone a couple of weeks. He wants to go to a temple at a city in the mountains. He believes that the temple was built by Solomon, it’s called the Temple of the Seal.”